One of the most controversial Kickstarter campaigns in history is dead — here's the product that actually got made

The Glowing Plant project was the first and
last synthetic biology campaign on Kickstarter.

After a series of missteps, the creators gave up on
their idea of making genetically-modified glowing plants, and
turned their attention to GMO scented moss.

Now the moss is available for purchase, but some
backers of the Glowing Plant project are still
unhappy.

Kickstarter is littered with the remains of failed product
launches — enticing pitches that attracted boatloads of
supporters, only to fizzle out after hitting a fundraising goal.
Sometimes the people behind a failed campaign had no
real plan for getting their product out to large numbers of
people; in other cases, the product was a
sham.

One of the most popular Kickstarter launches of the last several
years was
the Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign, which raised nearly
half a million dollars in 2013 to create a genetically-engineered
plant that could glow in the dark. But the glowing plants
promised to backers never appeared. The
product wasn't a sham, but it wasn't exactly rooted in
reality, either.

"It was too ambitious for what's possible with synthetic
biology at the moment," said Antony Evans, the CEO of Taxa Biotechnologies, which was behind
the Kickstarter.

Unlike other dead Kickstarters, the glowing-plant saga
never quite ended. Eventually, it led to an entirely new
product that rolled out in August: genetically-modified
scented moss.

The first — and last — synthetic biology Kickstarter
campaign

In the Kickstarter video announcing the glowing plant
campaign, Evans played up the product's possibilities: "Our
generation's frontier is synthetic biology," he said. "Our team
of Stanford-trained PhD's...are using off-the-shelf methods to
create real glowing plants in a do-it-yourself bio lab in
California."

When
I first spoke with Evans in 2013, he was optimistic that
glowing-plant technology could one day be potent and widespread
enough to be used for street lighting. "We’re taking a
fundamentally open approach to this," he said at the time. "We’re
publishing our results as we go, and updating our lab notebook
online. We are fully expecting that someone will take our DNA
construct and come up with some other [glowing] plant."

But as the small Taxa team soon found out, the technology wasn't
quite there.

In order to make a glowing plant, they needed to insert
several genes normally found in bioluminescent bacteria into
their Arabidopsis plant's genome. The team was never
able to get all the necessary genes in at the same time, and
they only got the plant to glow dimly. It wasn't a shippable
product.

Soon after the campaign was funded, Kickstarter banned all
future synthetic biology campaigns amidst
blowback in the media and worries among members of the
scientific community that the Taxa project would create a
precedent for "the unsupervised release of GMOs," according
to
the Verge. By the end of the campaign, Taxa's
project ended up being one of the most controversial
Kickstarter campaigns in history.

Nine months into the process, Taxa
got an investment from prominent tech incubator Y Combinator.
At the end of 2015, the team finally had a DNA-assembling system
that worked, but it couldn't make the technology function in a
way that complied with USDA regulations.

Orbella
Moss.Taxa

Eventually, Evans' cofounders fell away, but he
continued working with a small group of scientists.

"It's honestly been a pretty rough four years. There have
been a lot of dark, difficult places. Biotech takes a long time,"
said Evans, who has an MBA and a background in mathematics. "It
started with all that excitement, and we had a lot of attention.
It created a lot of expectations that took us a lot of time to
realize we couldn't meet."

A quest to democratize GMO technology

After experimenting with various product ideas, including a
"living glow-stick," the team settled on scented GMO moss. The
product symbolizes Taxa's goal of proving that GMO technology
doesn't have to just be in the hands of large
corporations.

Creating scented moss was a more reasonable goal for
the Taxa team, since moss is much less complex than
the Arabidopsis plant the team used for the glowing plant
project. It also has a simpler genome and a shorter life-cycle,
which cuts down the time it takes to do experiments.

Antony Evans and the
Orbella Moss.Taxa

Taxa started working on scented moss a year ago, and
quickly came up with a working prototype.

The moss, which went on
sale in mid-August, is available in three varieties:
patchouli, linalool (a spicy and floral scent found in cleaning
products), and geraniol (a rose-like scent found in mosquito
repellant).

Backers of the original glowing plant campaign can use the
money they sank into the project on scented moss. At
$79 plus shipping, it's more expensive than the glowing
plant, but Evans is confident backers will be happy with the
new product.

"I think backers recognize that we persisted in this
long past the point where it made sense," he said.

A brief look through the thousand-plus comments on the
Kickstarter campaign shows that some backers are satisfied
with what they're getting. But plenty are not.

"$79 seems a bit expensive for smelly moss," reads one
comment. Another says: "This isn't cool at all. We've
waited over 3 years and now we have a chance to get something but
only if we spend another $40 plus $10 in shipping?"

Evans is ultimately hoping that bigger brands in the
home fragrance industry will want to work with Taxa. "Brands
are excited about the project, and understand the value
proposition as a containerless moss. They want to see more proof
around flavors," Evans said.

Taxa isn't a GMO behemoth like Monsanto, but the company
still faces a similar challenge: consumer resistance to GMO
products. Evans thinks the fact that it's a non-edible GMO
product could make a difference for some people.

No matter what happens with the moss in the long-term,
Taxa's story offers a lesson for science-based crowdfunding
campaigns on platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter: Unless
you've already nailed the science, find another way to raise
money.

"It's not the right format to promise something where
there's such high technical risk," Evans said. "It's not that we
couldn't get our product shipped from China. With us,
ultimately the reason we failed is because we couldn't get 20,000
base pairs into a plant."